


A Matter of Living

by Barkour



Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: AU, F/M, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-20
Updated: 2016-04-20
Packaged: 2018-06-03 11:46:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,594
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6609529
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Barkour/pseuds/Barkour
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Magnus did not care to die.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Matter of Living

**Author's Note:**

> I still have not seen beyond 1x6! No spoilers! Thank you! Here is some stupid art shit.

1.

A river ran through the earth, and along that river stood strange, old cities. They were bone and they were rock; they breathed of flesh. 

In one such city, in the years of his youth, Magnus received a curse. It came to him like so:

An ancient woman carried her flesh like a mantle. It swung from her bones in sheeted curtains. She had sat outside a temple devoted to the far, long god, a god whose name was buried in stone that no man might recall it from the dead stars. 

Twelve centuries, claimed the priest. That was how long she had sat there. If a man paid her two knuckle bones from a fresh grave she might tell him the true future, the end to which all roads led. This end was death. 

Magnus was young. He could not die. He claimed two knuckle bones and he brought them to her. 

An odor of old rot surrounded her. Grime sat in the folds of her thin and wretched skin. The bones of her chest showed through the flesh, as clearly delineated as the joints that Magnus dropped into the copper bowl set before her.

Deep in the old sockets, some memory of eyes stirred. Her jaw cracked. Dust spilled between her teeth.

"Tell me," Magnus said, and he called her old mother in the ancient most tongue. 

She laughed at him. She laughed at his respect. Magnus made to leave. The bones had cost him little.

"You will die," she said to him. 

She spoke in foul Aklo, the madness speech, the language that was heritage to all born of demons. 

Magnus stood before her again. He looked down at her. His heart wormed in his breast.

"You will die," she said again, "and you will want it." 

She laughed. More dust fell from her dried and cracked mouth. The gums had gone. Only the teeth remained.

"Old in your skin and ready to die."

"I am a warlock," he told her. The skin of his neck crawled. "Do you know what that means? Have you forgotten, old mother?"

"Cleave the bone and break the blood," she said. "Death is the end."

She raised her hand, hidden behind her. The flesh had stripped from it. In this his youth Magnus had not yet known all the horrors of the world. This simple horror stopped him. A thousand joints, crudely stuck together, a web of bone at the end of the wrist.

"Thank you for your respect, child," said the old woman. "Please go. I am very hungry."

Magnus fled.

2.

He buried his wife that century, and he placed a warding on her bones that no fool youth might feed her knuckles to a desiccated thing. After the funeral, Magnus left the civilized steppes. 

The cities of the west gleamed. He discovered temptation. Kings begged his kisses. Queens begged his spells. He gave love freely and found the act of the giving brought pleasure. 

The flesh drawn taut about her bones. The blood on her teeth as she coughed through the night. Her breath, weak as she whispered, "Magnus. Magnus. Don't leave me. Please." His wife had clutched his hand to her breast.

In the king's court of Sweden, Magnus filled glasses with old wines. He laughed at older jokes. Rings of gold to join his rings of jade. 

An aging queen called for Magnus. He went carelessly to her. She was sat up in her bed with her thin fingers covered in silver and lace. A fat and purring cat stared with lidded eyes at Magnus.

"You're the same as ever," she marveled. "Is it so?"

"But you're even more beautiful."

She laughed at this. Her laugh had hoarsened over the years. The breadth of her smile had not changed over much.

"I have something to give you."

"Ah, and your generosity," he said. "Very well. I accept all gifts of silk and rare stones."

She laughed again, though she did so with her lace cuff held before her mouth. The cat rubbed its head on the sheets, piled thickly on her.

Beneath the fine fragrances so richly layered, and the smells of the candles burning in their polished holders, Magnus smelled what was on the queen. The rot moved in her.

"It would please me very much if you would take this cat," said the queen.

"Pardonnez-moi?" said Magnus.

"For heaven's sake, I said it clearly," she said. "His name is Perrie and he very much likes fish." She scritched her fingers through the fur along his thick belly.

"So I see," said Magnus politely. 

The queen's eyes fell to the cat. She smiled to herself as she petted it. The cat rumbled, pleased, beneath her attentions.

"He is the most precious thing to me," said the queen. "I would like him to live out his life in comfort."

"Thank you for the flattery, but surely I couldn't offer him more comforts than he would find here."

"Do you think my son cares for cats? No," she said, "someone should love him."

Magnus thought this was a tall order. He put his arms out.

Dryly the old queen said, "You'll have to come closer."

Sighing, he stood up to take the cat from her. The cat rumbled against his chest. He doubted the foolish thing even realized it had changed arms.

The queen caressed the cat's idly swiping tail. Her eyes, rheumy and heavy with her years, focused on the cat and on Magnus' hand, slipped up to hold it below the belly.

"I hope," said the queen, "that Perrie will give you to someone who will love you. You may go now. Thank you for coming."

He left the castle with the cat in a brass cage. In the carriage, jostled by the road, Magnus unhooked the door. The cat, complaining, oozed out to stalk the plush seats. 

Magnus stared at it and thought of his wife. "Don't leave me," she'd said. He had watched each line come upon her face. It was as though she had never aged, to him; she had always been as she was before him.

"I don't want to die," he told the cat. 

The cat turned twice and laid upon the opposite seat.

Ten years. Then Magnus buried the cat outside his manor. In the morning he went to the village and claimed three kittens from the baker's daughter. Her father meant to drown the litter. 

They were sweet little things, those kittens. They toddled unsurely on their paws, and they stared weakly all about them. Magnus laid on the floor with them in his fine tailored clothes and stroked each gently so that they would know his hand.

3\. 

Heinrich of the black hair. Sophia with the birthmark spilled red across her face. Tomas, Sug-weon, Marcello. Cleave the bone. He thought it easier to simply fall in love again. He liked the laughing.

4.

Camille, in the shadows, her hands deliberate upon his throat. Magnus rolled with her along the sheets, fine satin, the fabric his choice but the color hers. He preferred blue to red.

"Come, Magnus," she murmured. "There's no need to be gentle with me."

Her eyes gleamed in the dark, as his eyes gleamed. What need to be gentle? What need to glamour? 

He smiled and stroked the back of his finger along her cheek. She arched invitingly. Her breasts, bared, shivered. He bent his head to them. 

When he named her love, she did not spurn it, and so Magnus thought: 

In the end it didn't matter what he thought.

5\. 

He was much changed toward the end of his fourth century. The third century, he supposed, if you counted the years as they did in the west. Love was another kind of rot. In his dour moments, when he relearned it was possible for a warlock to have too much to drink, Magnus thought he would always want to love someone. The prospect of continuing to chase romance made him ill. Yet he kept cats, still, and he luxuriated in satin sheets with warm bodies, and he believed he could very well live like so forever. That was immortality for you.

In the empty night he listened to Chairman Meow walk quietly through the empty, quiet rooms, and Magnus sat by the window and looked out at the city where the people walked and laughed and lived. To think them so happy when they were meant to die. The lights glimmered and he enjoyed them.

6\. 

An evening, a late evening, spent quietly with a shadowhunter as the night thickened and the room darkened. Magnus, exhausted from the day's toil, the work of chasing the Circle round and round an ignorant world, drifted. 

Alec set his glass down. The muted clink against the table roused Magnus' attention. He looked drowsily up at Alec, who had stood to put away the glass. His own glass hung precariously from two fingers.

Alec licked at his lips. Magnus blinked some of the sleep from his eyes. 

"Magnus," said Alec in his deep voice. 

"Alexander," Magnus countered. 

Alec's hands fidgeted. His shoulders stooped. Magnus set his own drink on the end table and tipped his face up to Alec.

"What is it?" 

He asked it gently. Alec needed gentleness. Magnus was beginning to think that was what Alec needed most of all, not a lover, but someone who would listen. He didn't mind being the someone who would listen. There would be other lovers, other years. He'd told Alec that he had unlocked something in Magnus but perhaps it was Magnus who had unlocked it and not Alec. Perhaps he was only lonely.

Alec looked away. He scrubbed his palm against his black jeans. Always black with you, thought Magnus fondly. 

"I'm sorry," Magnus said. He rubbed at his eyes. "I'm rather maudlin. Four cups in and you start thinking of-- Well, you don't want to hear my fourteenth century woes."

A corner of Alec's mouth flipped up. He looked sidelong at Magnus and his eyelashes were low. 

"You're only three hundred years old."

"Ah, a sprightly youth compared to your old bones," Magnus mocked. "How are your knees holding up?"

Alec ignored the tease, though his neck reddened. He was quite the ugly blusher, Magnus' Alexander. And there's your trouble, Magnus thought. 

Magnus shrugged it off in a stretch. His arms pulled delightfully. How lucky to never know the sting of arthritis. His elbow popped and Magnus yelped. 

Alec chuckled and bent over him. "Don't stretch it all the way out like that. Not first thing." 

He palpated Magnus' arm between his hands. The breadth of his palms did not dwarf Magnus' biceps; his fingers did not scald Magnus' flesh through his linen shirt.

"Nothing's more satisfying than a good stretch," Magnus said. "Except the burn afterwards."

"The burn means you pushed too hard." 

Alec tested Magnus' elbow with two fingers, dug into the outer join. Magnus' gut moved in slow, roiling turns. Magnus swallowed.

"Give me a moment to sober up," Magnus said. He pulled his arm from Alec. "I'll make a portal for you. Spare you the horrors of the subway."

Alec did not stand. He was looking somewhere else, gaze directed at Magnus but unseeing, and he chewed on his lovely lower lip.

Magnus made a show of arching an eyebrow at him.

"Is looming a new shadowhunter technique? I have to say. It's very effective."

Alec drew a deep breath. His shoulders squared. Magnus had a moment of alarm, and then Alec leaned in and kissed him.

The kiss was brief. Alec leaned out. The ugly red blush had moved to his face. Magnus stared at him. He opened his mouth. He closed it again.

"You," said Magnus weakly.

Alec swallowed. The knot of his throat worked. He nodded inelegantly. Magnus' fingers were curled deep into the cushions of the couch on either side of him. This isn't for me, Magnus thought. Mortal hearts and mortal wants. Only a tease, that was all it was, an act of empathy for a magnificent young man stuck in a misery not of his choosing. 

Magnus licked his own lips. Alec's gaze dropped. He followed the motion of Magnus' tongue. His shoulders heaved with his breathing. Magnus felt his own chest tightening with every slow, anticipating pulse of his heart. 

"Well," said Magnus, "don't stop there." His breath shivered in his throat. He licked his lips again then let them fall, parted, made slick. "Aren't you going to ravish me, Alexander?"

Alexander broke into unlikely giggles. His nervousness burst. In the small moments before Magnus' heartbeat began to stir and canter, Magnus could not place what it was he felt looking up at red-faced Alec, solemn scowling Alec, with an arm up over his face as he laughed. 

Astonishment, Magnus thought; or wonder. What a thing to find after so many years. 

Magnus reached for Alec's shirt collar and pulled him down for another kiss, a proper kiss, a kiss that had Alexander moaning quietly. His arms surrounded Magnus, no small man. The strength of them was steady, like rock. Magnus was grounded beneath him. He was rooted. Alec kissed like a man who had never had the chance to and now he meant to take this chance with Magnus. 

Magnus wound an arm about Alec's shoulder and pulled him flush to Magnus, close to feel the ragged motion of Alec's chest as he struggled to breathe, close to take the warmth of him, close to keep him, yes, to keep him. He would not let go. Please don't let go. Alec's breath warmed. His hands made Magnus real. The blood coursed through Magnus and he was alive. Alec was alive; they were alive. 

Alec said, "Magnus," and Magnus said, "Let me show you," and Alec swallowed and said, "Yes," and Magnus took what he had to give and he gave it to Alexander.

7.

Cleave the bone and break the blood. Immortality was such a long thing. It was as sharing milk on the steppes with his wife, or breaking bread with a queen. Fewer years, but more of them, too. A life shared rather than hoarded.

Magnus waited to regret it. He didn't. What was life if it had nothing in it? And anyway, he thought perhaps that was the point. This is the end. The end is death. Stories are meant to end. That is how you love them.

In the depths of the earth an old woman sat eternal and spoke absolution to others; and in the morning Magnus woke and rolled on to his side and laid his head on Alec's shoulder and listened as Alec breathed warm and sweet and living. 

Chairman Meow leapt from the dresser to the floor. A bottle of hair oil fell. The glass splattered. Alec grumbled in his sleep and stirred. The rune carved black on his throat showed like a trail of char. Magnus swept the hair from Alec's eyes then slid his hand deliberately beneath the sheets, low, lower, very low indeed. Alec's breath caught.

"Good morning, Alexander," said Magnus. 

Alec opened his eyes. The morning light deepened the brown of them. He smiled at Magnus, a soft smile but comfortable. 

"G'morning," he said.

"Now tell me," said Magnus, stroking once, "are you happy to see me?" and Alec turned to hide his face in Magnus' shoulder as he laughed. 

Chairman Meow shook the oil from his paws and stalked out from the room.

**Author's Note:**

> I nicked "Aklo" from the writer Arthur Machen.


End file.
